


Sounds of Suffering

by plotweaver



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2018-03-21 11:12:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3690075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plotweaver/pseuds/plotweaver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bilbo is wounded and captured with the rest of the company after the spider attack in Mirkwood. First aid must be administered in the elven prison by Bifur, his cellmate. </p><p>Or...</p><p>The one where Bilbo is hurt and Thorin loses his cool because he can't be by his side.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sounds of Suffering

Thorin tried to keep his feet under him as the elves threw him bodily into the cell. He failed. Paying no attention to the sharp rock of the floor that had surely broken through even his tough dwarven skin at the knees, Thorin immediately regained his feet and whirled back to face the opening of his cell. He lunged for his jailors, but was stopped by the cool steel of his cell’s barred door, slammed suddenly in his face.

“Khahum menu rkhas shirumundu!” he yelled, pressed up against the bars.

The elves retreated, but Thorin’s frantic anger did not. He looked up, to a cell carved into the opposite wall of the small cavern that served as the Mirkwood prison. He had briefly seen the elves dragging the unconscious hobbit somewhere around that area before he was unceremoniously thrown to the ground.

“Is anyone with the hobbit? Can anyone see him?” He slammed his shoulders against the door in a desperately stupid attempt to knock it off its hinges.

Bifur emerged from the darkness of the cell Thorin had been staring at. 

“Halfling with me,” he signed.

“Does he live?” Thorin kept his voice steady. 

“Yes,” Bifur signed, but Thorin did not allow himself to relax. 

“Is he hurt?”

“Bad,” Bifur signed. “Spider spike in shoulder.”

Thorin’s stomach dropped. 

The spider attack had come on them too fast. It had been that damn forest. The humidity had begun to condense on his face and the ground had rolled up to meet him right before the spiders had come upon them. He had been barely able to raise his sword let alone defend anyone else. Only half-strangled battle cries and whirls of color surrounded him; no way to discern the Halfling from the skirmish.

Then the elves had come, and the world swirled less and sickened more. They were saved, yes, a feat they could have done on their own no doubt, but now they were also found out. They were to be brought to Thranduil, that shirumund ass.

Thorin could stomach all that, but when he saw a ruddy red jacket stained with a brighter crimson, he tasted the too sweet bile in the back of his throat.

He didn’t have time to retch, however, before being brutally shoved and led into the domain of the elf king.

Blood on his coat was one thing, but knowing that Bilbo had a poisonous spider sting wedged into his flesh charged Thorin’s mind into a frenzy.

“Take it out, Bifur,” he yelled, “Now!”

“No, Bifur!” Oin’s voice came from somewhere to the left. Thorin snarled at the dissent. The hobbit’s time was running out, to be sure. Who knows how long he had that sting in him? Thorin cursed himself for letting the forest cloud his senses, for not keeping Bilbo next to him, safe, where he belonged.

Oin continued before Thorin found his voice. “You must assess the sting. Is it barbed?”

Bifur disappeared into the darkness of the cell before coming back and answering, “Yes.”

Thorin swore that if they ever made it out of that hellhole, he’d hunt down every last spider and slowly chop off their legs before severing their heads.

“There will be more blood then,” Oin said. “Prepare as much cloth as you can to suppress the bleeding.”

Bifur nodded solemnly.

“And,” Oin hesitated, “make it quick, for the poor lad’s sake.”

Bifur disappeared then, further back into the darkness of his cell. Thorin gripped the bars of his own, bracing himself.

Then Bilbo screamed. 

Long and loud, it echoed through the cavernous prison. Choruses of agony bounced off the walls and rang in Thorin’s ears. He bowed his head against it, enduring even as it felt like the noise pierced his very soul.

This was his doing. Bilbo’s pain fell on his shoulders, and it was a burden too heavy to bear. He sunk to his knees and let the screams fill him until they were nothing and everything inside him.

Thorin pressed himself painfully against the bars. If he tried hard enough, if he wanted it bad enough, he could pass through the bars like air. He could pass over the cavern, into Bilbo's cell and quell his sounds of torture. But the bars remained steadfast, and he had to endure the sound of his burglar in pain.

Ages later, the cavern petered off into silence, and Bifur emerged once again at the entrance of the cell.

"Halfling unconscious. Breathing normal. Excess of blood," he signed.

Thorin, who had been in a daze of tense muscles and that damned scream that would never leave him, immediately snapped to the present.

"What does that mean?" When Bifur didn't answer, he tried to rattle the bars of his cage, but they would not budge. "Oin!" he said, directing his frustration to the medic, "What does it mean?"

"It means he'll be weak," came the answer. "I doubt there's a lethal amount of poison in him. If there were, he'd have died of a fever an hour ago. As it is, I expect he'll come to in awhile to rid his body of the rest.”

 

#

 

Sure enough, after hours of silence passed between the dwarves, a sudden rustling from Bilbo and Bifur’s cell yanked Thorin’s attention upward. He had not been looking at their cell. Instead, he had chosen to knock quiet rhythms of old songs on the rocks around him, anything to keep him out of his own head for too long. 

But now Bilbo appeared at the door to his cell. His skin was pale and his eyes gaunt. He looked like a living cadaver. Thorin leapt to his feet.

“Bilbo!” he shouted.

Bilbo looked in his direction and squinted his eyes. He looked as if he had no idea who Thorin was and why he was calling his name. 

And then Bilbo retched. 

The groans of the company sounded off the walls of the cavern almost as loudly as Bilbo’s sick noises.

Thorin raked his fingers through his hair. 

“Oin?” he asked, his voice nearly breaking.

“His body is getting rid of the poison. We can only wait it out now, Thorin.” Oin said.

It wasn’t the answer Thorin wanted to hear. He was a dwarf. When something needed to be made, he smithed. When a battle needed to be won, he fought. Here he was helpless. Bilbo was writhing in pain and he sat in a cell, prevented from being of any use by two sets of bars and an embarrassing lack of medical knowledge.

An elven guard passed, ever graceful, as if there were no guttural sounds of pain and sickness inhabiting every particle of the air in the cavern. Thorin rattled the bars of his cell, enraged.

“Ishkhaqwi ai durugnul! Have you no care? Have you no soul at all? He could be dying,” he forced the words out, even though he never let that possibility enter his mind. “You would let an innocent die in here because of blind allegiance to your shirumund king?”

His insults chased the retreating guard out of the prison but could not drown out Bilbo’s suffering.

 

#

 

The king’s council concluded, the advisors slowly walked away from the table, but still Legolas lingered.

“Is there something we have missed?” Thranduil asked from the head of the table. No note of impatience tinged his voice, but Legolas understood that he was meant to feel it all the same.

“The guards,” Legolas said, “They speak of madness amongst the dwarves.”

“Madness?” The corners of Thranduil’s mouth turned upward.

“The dwarf king is relentless. He spews insults and threats at anyone who passes.”

“We expected this, Legolas.”

“And he wishes to see the hobbit.”

Thranduil tilted his head in curiosity. “The hobbit?”

“There was one among their company. He was injured in the skirmish against the spiders, but he remains alive. They are in separate cells, but the dwarf would have that changed.”

“Indeed?” Thranduil’s eyes did not leave Legolas now. The small smile was gone from his face, and he leaned forward in interest.

“He is quite adamant. He says he will not fall quiet until either himself or the medic is transferred into the hobbit’s cell.”

Thranduil appeared to contemplate this news as one might contemplate a mildly amusing joke. 

“Well then,” he said, “we should be obliging hosts. Have the guards transfer the dwarf king to the hobbit’s cell.”

“My lord?” Legolas did not believe he had heard correctly.

“You will watch him, Legolas,” Thranduil said, lowering his voice. “See if this weakness can be used to our advantage.”

“Yes, my lord.”

 

#

 

Thorin faded in and out of consciousness. 

It was this state of unawareness that prevented him from insulting the elven guard as he approached. The door to the cell screeched open, and Thorin leapt to his feet as if he had been awake for hours. The elf entered the cell, towering over Thorin, and Thorin took a step back, unsure of what was happening. He stumbled a bit as he was manhandled out of the cell.

“Where are we going?” he asked. No answer. He attempted to jerk his arm out of the elven guard’s grasp, but the guard held on tightly. Thorin swallowed at least a dozen insults threatening to burst forward from his lips.

The elf led him to the steps connecting one side of the cavern to the other. They climbed upward, and before Thorin could dare to hope, the guard opened the door to Bilbo’s cell and tossed him in.

Bilbo sat propped up against the rough stone in the back corner of the cell. Bifur had wrapped some of his furs around him. The size of the coat made Bilbo seem even smaller, and Thorin dismissed all regard of propriety and dignity and rushed to the halfling's side.

His hands shook as he contemplated where to place them, where they would provide comfort and not shatter his pale and shivering burglar. Once Bilbo began to cough, Thorin spurred into action. He curled one arm around Bilbo's shoulders, helping him sit more upright while the other shaking hand came to rest over Bilbo’s heart. Thorin felt it thundering underneath his palm, and what little emotional control he had left crumbled. Seeing his burglar like this wrecked him.

 

#

 

Bilbo woke to the rather odd thought that he hadn’t heard a voice tinged with this much concern since his mother found her hydrangeas wilting. His mother loved all things living, but hydrangeas brought such an incredible joy to her – in no small part because she was the only hobbit in the Shire with a thumb green enough to grow them. So when they wilted right after a cold snap, she was very upset indeed. 

The voice he heard through the haze now, however, was much deeper and urgent. Bilbo fought through the oppressive black of unconsciousness to hear what the voice was saying.

“…swear Bilbo. Mahal help me.”

Then came a few guttural words that he could not understand. He found the strength to open his eyes.

When he was a mere boy, Bilbo’s mother would tell him stories to calm him into sleep. His favorites involved the creatures that his mother told him were too beautiful to be given any name in the common tongue. They were said to be Aulë’s warriors. They had lightning in their eyes, she told him, and the sun in their smiles. All who beheld them trembled and fell into silence, waiting for them to speak. 

As he opened his eyes, he saw the creature of his mother’s stories before him. The planes of his face were so angular, so carefully cut, that he could not be made by anything other than Aulë’s loving hand. 

But there was something not quite right. In all of his dreams, Bilbo pictured these magnificent beings happy and with joy. This one’s forehead was furrowed with deep lines of worry. His eyes were searching for something, as if he were drowning and desperately looking for aid. His mouth was pressed into a thin line – so thin that it nearly disappeared in his beard entirely. Such a beautiful being should not have such an expression, Bilbo thought.

Bilbo lifted his hand to the face before him, which took no small effort. His hand felt heavier than the richest of swords, but it was worth the trouble to see the worried face turn to wonder when he did so. Bilbo stroked his thumb over the pressed lips until they went slack. They were softer than any cloth in the Shire. The face was more beautiful now than it had been when he woke, and he was sure it was to be more beautiful in the moments to come, but his eyes were so heavy, his arm was so heavy, everything seemed to pull him back down into the black.

But he had to know this creature before him. It was so oddly familiar and comforting, but no less striking for being so. He thought maybe it was because his mother described faces like these every night, and sent Bilbo to sleep dreaming of them. Bilbo forced his mouth to move.

“You will be here when I wake?” 

Bilbo saw the face nod through his slowly shutting eyelids. He felt the ends of the creature’s braids tickling the sweat on his own forehead. Why was he sweating if it was so cold?

The blackness was coming all too fast now to swallow him up.

“Beautiful,” Bilbo managed to say, before letting his hand fall from the lips he had been caressing moments before.

The last thing he felt was a tightening over his body, as if he were locked in the most protective of embraces.

**Author's Note:**

> So there you have it. Please let me know what you think!
> 
> As of right now, I'm not writing more chapters for this thing, because it took FOREVER to get out of my head and onto the page, and I'm not super proud of it as is. I know it's kind of a half-ending, but Thilbo is always endgame for me, so just imagine that they all got out and Thorin and Bilbo lived happily ever after.
> 
> Maybe MAYBE one day (not in the foreseeable future) I'll add to this. NO PROMISES.
> 
> Also, the khuzdul translations (found by searching google):
> 
> Khahum menu rkhas shirumundu! - Your clan are beardless orcs!  
> shirumund - beardless  
> Ishkhaqwi ai durugnul! - I spit on your grave!


End file.
